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OPINION

‘Selma’ portrays more than ‘dreamers’

Director Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” is a riveting and powerful depiction of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights struggle. This compelling film reveals the scope of King’s radical vision, the fierce opposition he faced and the conflicting currents that only this savvy movement politician had to navigate. It should sweep the Academy Awards.

The greatest testament to the film’s power is the controversy it has spawned. Defenders of Lyndon Johnson, several prominent historians and even King’s longtime ally Andrew Young have objected to its depiction of the president as being at odds, rather than a co-conspirator, with King.

The debate over the film eerily replays a telling chapter of the primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008. In the run-up to the South Carolina presidential primary, in which nearly half the voters would be African-American, Clinton argued that “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done.” Naturally, this raised hackles throughout the African-American community, leading Clinton to charge that the Obama campaign was “deliberately distorting this.”

The conflicting perspectives reflect very different angles of vision. King and the courageous citizens who were putting their lives on the line in nonviolent demonstrations were demanding action at the federal level. Johnson and his predecessor John F. Kennedy, however sympathetic, were worried about sustaining a Democratic coalition still anchored by powerful Southern senators. Both felt pressured by the demonstrators. This wasn’t a love fest.

After the 1964 election, Johnson did talk regularly with King. King both valued the relationship and understood its limits. He kept the pressure on that helped produce the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The culmination was the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and the police riot that generated moral outrage across the country – and helped Johnson drive the Voting Rights Act through Congress. In his historic speech to Congress afterward, Johnson embraced the civil rights movement: “Their cause must be our cause. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” We have not witnessed such leadership or courage from any president since that moment.

Johnson and King’s relationship could not last. King’s moral clarity and courage left him no choice but to speak out against the Vietnam War.

The film “Selma” – and the dispute over King and Johnson’s role – offers deep insight for this period of Gilded Age inequality and deepening corruption. Against entrenched injustice, it takes a movement – independent leaders with moral vision, courageous citizens sick and tired of being sick and tired. And yes, it takes a president with the will and the skill to push change through a system designed to impede it. To make America better, look to movements, not presidents, people in motion, not legislators in session.